Earth’s Children Maps

I found an awesome website today, where Don has redrawn all the maps of Ayla and Jondalar’s journeys from the Earth’s Children (Clan of the Cave Bear) series by Jean M. Auel.

I love maps. I work on maps all day at my real job and I especially love books with maps! While reading, I often flip back to the maps to reference where I am on the journey.

One of the things I love most about these books in particular are the great maps at the front of the book.  I am currently listening to the audio of the 4th book in the series, The Plains of Passage, and since I don’t own a hard copy of this book, Don’s maps make everything in the story truly come to life.

Thanks to Don for all his hard work on these maps!

Check out Don’s website for a plethora of great maps and other archaeological information related to the series.

 

My reviews:

• The Clan of the Cave Bear
• The Valley of Horses
• The Mammoth Hunters

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Review: The Mammoth Hunters

The Mammoth Hunters by Jean M. Auel, Audio narrated by Sandra Burr

Earth’s Children Series #3

Fiction, Published 1985

Challenges: Audio Book Challenge, Historical Fiction Challenge

Read April 2011, Unabridged – 26 hrs

Story: 3/5, Narration: 5/5

• #1: The Clan of the Cave Bear
• #2: The Valley of Horses

Book Blurb:

Now with her devoted Jondalar, Ayla boldly sets forth into the land of the Mamutoi – the Mammoth Hunters, the Others she has been seeking.  Though Ayla must learn their strange customs and language, it is because of her uncanny hunting and healing skills that she is adopted into the Mammoth Hearth.  Here Ayla finds her first women friends, and painful memories of the Clan she has left behind.  Here, too, is Ranec, the dark-skinned, magnetic master carver of ivory tusks to whom Ayla is irresistibly drawn – setting Jondalar on fire with jealousy.  Throughout the icy winter, Ayla is torn between her two men.  But soon will come the great spring mammoth hunt, when Ayla must choose her mate and her desiny – to remain in the Hearth with Ranec, or to follow Jondalar into a far-off place and an unknown future.

Thoughts:

I came to love many of the members of the Lion Camp and their relationships with each other and with the newcomers.   They not only accept Ayla and Jondalar into their camp, but also her horses.  They even build an annex for them, which many of the Mamutoi find shocking, to persuade Ayla to stay the winter with them.  Among their members, is Rydag, a young boy who is like Ayla’s son, half Clan and half “the Others.”  When Ayla teaches him the Clan ways to talk with his hands, the members of the Lion Camp realize that he is not dumb, but was just unable to speak like them. 

I’ve been listening to the audio books of this series back to back. Absolutely LOVED The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of Horses, but this one seems very, very repetitive and had to listen to 26 hours of Ayla’s ridiculous love triangle drama. Come on Jondalar, step up!!   You would think that after all the mishaps in their communication skills in the valley that they would have realized that perhaps they should consider NOT making assumptions about what the other person thinks or feels and just come out and ask them! It certainly would have saved a few hundred pages of ridiculous miscommunications!  Really, for someone who is supposed to be so understanding of subtle, and perhaps not so subtle, body language, you would think Ayla would get it through her thick skull why Jondalar is avoiding her and sleeping with another man in the SAME cave as him where he can HEAR EVERYTHING does not help matters…seriously!!!

I will continue with the series because I want to see what happens with Ayla and Jondalar, but do they have to be the most genius members of all mankind, really???  I would like to see another person come up with a new idea instead of Ayla or Jondalar. And I wonder what will happen with Wolf!

LOVE THIS REVIEW on Amazon! Hilarious!

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Review: The Valley of Horses

The Valley of Horses by Jean M. Auel, Audio narrated by Sandra Burr

Earth’s Children Series #2

Fiction, Published 1982

Challenges: Audio Book Challenge, Historical Fiction Challenge

Read March 2011, Unabridged – 21 hrs

Story: 5/5, Narration: 5/5

• #1: The Clan of the Cave Bear
  

Book Blurb:

In The Valley of Horses, Ayla, the unforgettable heroine of The Clan of the Cave Bear, sets out on her own odyssey of discovery away from the nurturing adoptive family and friends of the Clan.  She is in search of others like herslef and in search of love.  Driven by her intelligence, her curiosity, and her destiny, she explores where the Clan never dared to travel and encounters a hostile world of awesome mystery, glacial cold, terrifying beasts, and intense loneliness in which survival itself is a constant battle.

Sharing a hidden valley with a herd of steppe horses, Ayla finds a unique friendship with animals as vulnerable as herself and ingeniously discovers the complex skills needed to survive – skills no Clan member was ever able to master.  But none of her experiences prepares her for the emotional turmoil she feels when she rescues a young man – the first of the Others she has seen – from almost certain death.  Torn between her desire for human companionship and her fear of the unknown Others, she struggles against her deep attraction to the handsome Jondalar.  It is Jondalar who teaches her the meaning of true friendship and love.

Thoughts:

I enjoyed listening to Ayla’s long journey away from the Clan and her many struggles and triumphs.  As we learned at the end of The Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla has been cast out of the Clan and all the people she grew up with and loves thinks she truly is dead.  So she must leave and follow her adoptive mother’s advice to find the Others, people of her own kind.  She walks a long way and decides she must find a more permanent home for the coming winter since she has not seen any people.  She finds a valley with a cave high above and sets up camp.  The descriptions of her making tools, killing animals for furs and meat, are truly amazing.  She constantly struggles with her complete isolation and makes friends with the most unlikely of her kind.

Jondalar and his brother, Thonolan, are on a rite of passage journey, one that takes them far away from their home, in search of the end of the Great Mother River.  It is a long journey, as they discover many kinds of people often join their families for meals and hunting parties.

The narration switches back and forth between Ayla and Jondalar’s stories until they finally meet and I really enjoyed both of their stories.  Usually, for me, when the story flip flops between two points of views, there is usually one that I like more than the other and can’t wait until it flips back, but that was not the case for this story.  I just could not wait until Ayla and Jondalar’s paths crossed, but this did not happen until at least 2/3 of the way through.

One of my favorite aspects of these books are the maps.  I love maps and whenever a books has one, I often find myself flipping back to it to see where the characters are in relationship to where they’ve been.

Side note: I should probably mention, too, that there are a lot of detailed sex scenes throughout these books, so don’t be shocked…

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Review: The Clan of the Cave Bear

The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel, Audio narrated by Sandra Burr

Earth’s Children Series #1

Fiction, Published 1980

Challenges: Audio Book Challenge, Series Challenge IV

Read April 2010

Story: 4/5, Narration: 5/5

Book Blurb:

This novel of awesome beauty and power is a moving saga about people, relationships, and the boundaries of love.  Through Jean M. Auel’s magnificent storytelling we are taken back to the dawn of modern humans, and with a girl named Ayla we are swept up in the harsh and beautiful Ice Age world they shared with the ones who called themselves the Clan of the Cave Bear.  A natural disaster leaves the young girl wandering alone in an unfamiliar and dangerous land until she is found by a woman of the Clan, people very different from her own kind.  To them, blond, blue-eyed Ayla looks peculiar and ugly – she is one of the Others, those who have moved into their ancient homeland; but Iza cannot leave the girl to die and takes her with them.  Iza and Creb, the old Mog-ur, grow to love her, and as Ayla learns the ways of the Clan and Iza’s way of healing, most come to accept her.  But the brutal and proud youth who is destined to become their next leader sees her difference as a threat to his authority.  He develops a deep and abiding hatred for the strange girl of the Others who lives in their midst, and is determined to get his revenge.

My Thoughts:

I really enjoyed this audio book.  At around 20 hours, unabridged, it took me just 2 weeks to finish it.  The narrator does a great job with expressing the Clan people, since most of their communications with each other are nonverbal.  This novel is very detail oriented with a lot of the author’s research of the Ice Age and neanderthal people coming to the forefront of the novel, especially descriptions about the plants Iza uses as the medicine woman.  The clan finds Ayla wandering along, nearly dead, after an earthquake has sent them away from their previous cave.  Iza takes it upon herself to care for the strange girl from “the others.”  They consider her to be strange and ugly and even though she is finally officially accepted into the clan, she continually struggles to conform to the ways of the clan.

I became very attached to Ayla’s story and often cringed through all the hardships she must endure, especially those that are inflicted by Broud, the son of the clan’s leader, Brun, and look forward to following her journey.  I wonder if she will forever be a wanderer.  Will she find her own people of the “Others” and will she ever make it back to her true family within the Clan of the Cave Bear?

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